Word: goya
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Colossus has always figured as a masterwork among Francisco Goya's chronicle of human suffering during Spain's war of independence (1808-1812). But now Madrid's Prado museum, which long gave it pride of place, has come closer than ever to acknowledging that Goya didn't paint it. At a June 26 press conference, curators announced the museum would continue its inquiry into the work's authenticity after its investigative team identified the initials A. J. in the painting's lower left corner with the Valencian painter Asensio Juliá, a friend and collaborator of Goya. Though reserving final...
...more than a decade, but voicing them has proven difficult. "At a certain point, an artist becomes a mythic national hero, and a painting takes on a life of it's own - it becomes sacred," says Manuela Mena, the Prado's chief curator of 18th-century painting and of Goya's work. "When you challenge that, you might as well be challenging religion - you're seen as a heretic, and you fall into the hands of the inquisition...
...Never more so, perhaps, than when you're dealing with Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, seen by many as a founding figure of modern art, and by most Spaniards as an icon of nationalism and revolutionary politics. Mena speaks from personal experience. When she was asked to write the catalog description for The Colossus for a Prado's exhibition in 1989, she already had doubts, but she knew that the painting was an untouchable part of Goya's oeuvre. "Less was known about Goya then," says Mena, "and what was known was not to be questioned...
Nevertheless, few subjects escape the artist's bleak skepticism. Still lifes tend to comment on the transience of things, but Goya's piles of lifeless fish and game lend unexpected violence to this theme: the white fur of a rabbit's belly exposes the wound where it was shot; the blank eyes of a lamb's skull look disconsolately at its butchered torso. Equally unsettling, a large painting of The Taking of Christ is notable less for the sorrowful figure at its center than for the jeering, crazed mob that surrounds him. The same menacing irrationality appears in disturbing later...
...etchings and drawings, especially those that make up the tormented series "Disasters of War," that Goya unleashed his most powerful critiques, and these are scattered throughout the Prado show. In stinging scenes that range from a ghastly militiaman butchering his enemies with an axe to a huddle of skeletal paupers begging miserably for scraps, "Disasters" exposes the lingering effects - moral, social and physical - of violence. Even for an audience accustomed to the barrage of brutal images emanating from Iraq and Afghanistan, these works, with their rough lines and muted colors, still - amazingly - possess the power to shock...